Dolly realized that all she had heard from upstairs lately was the distant drone of the radio. Mrs. Audry Talbot—who every day gave advice on everything: home remedies, dealing with willful children, force-ripening plums, killing a live chicken and plucking it, coping gracefully with untidy houseguests, buying presents for servants, for your doctor and dentist, and even on weaning pups—spoke today with a guest about roasting a duck in the Chinese manner. The volume on the radio was high, so that Mrs. Sangha, wherever she was, would hear the programs. Mrs. Sangha was not far, however. She leaned against the doorjamb between the kitchen and the dining room. A kitchen towel hung around her neck.
Dolly asked for the children. Mrs. Sangha was too busy listening to the program. She nodded in agreement with Mrs. Talbot and Mrs. Talbot’s guest about the quantity of anise to be used in the seasoning. Dolly wiped her hands on her apron and hesitantly went through the house. She came upon the children in Mrs. Sangha’s bedroom and watched them from the doorway. They were standing atop the piano stool, which they had dragged in from the drawing room, peering into the top drawer of a tall dresser. The girl was whispering to the boy that the contents of the drawer belonged to her father. There was a stout blue bottle with a dented silver cap. The bottle was oily. A length of thread and a strand of black hair clung to the oily surface. There was a crumpled silver-colored tube of medicine, an eyedropper with a black rubber cap on one end, a greasy tortoiseshell comb that had short black hairs and matted gray dust wound about its teeth, a silver U-shaped tongue scraper, and several loose pennies. The girl knew which ones were from the U.K. and that a particular one was from someplace called Canada. There was a heavy gold-plated lighter and a number of brass keys, each a different size and shape. There was a big corroded iron one. The children tried each key in the keyhole of the drawer. None worked. There was an empty silver cigarette holder with NRS etched in curly script, a stamp from the U.S.A. that was stuck to one of the drawer’s side panels. The boy tried to slip his nail under an edge of the stamp. The sound of his fingernail scraping the wood panel was all he was able to accomplish. The girl pushed his hand away from the stamp, telling him, “No, don’t do that. You will tear it.” There was a sticky blue jar, the lid of which they managed to unscrew. A faint smell of camphor and eucalyptus escaped. The girl put her forefinger in the jar and scooped up some of the ointment. She put it to the boy’s nose.
Dolly watched them, wondering what they might find, and wondering if Mrs. Sangha knew they were in her room, meddling in her husband’s dresser. She wondered if it had ever occurred to her son to ask the girl where her father was. When he picked up the lighter and attempted to open it, Dolly rushed to him, grabbed both his hands, and yanked him off the stool. She slapped him sharply on both hands. She hit him again, twice on his bottom. The little girl scrambled off the stool and screamed, “Ma, Ma. Quick. Dolly beating him.”
Dolly snapped at her, “You, hush your mouth. He have no right in here.” She turned to her son. “What you doing in this room and in that drawer? And who tell you you could drag that stool in here? You can’t see it will scratch up the floor? What trouble is this? You can’t mind your own business? Look, child, I leave you home next week, yes.” She knew that she could not leave him back in Raleigh.
Mrs. Sangha rushed in, tea towel in hand. The boy, who had not shed a tear as yet, set his face up to cry when he saw her. His mother raised her hand to him. “Look, don’t start up with that stupidness now, you hear me?” He looked at Mrs. Sangha, who looked back, the corners of her mouth drawn in pity. He watched her, his mouth taking on the downward turn of hers, and squeezed his eyes hard. She reached for him, and the moment he was in her arms, the tears and the heaving sobbing began. Mrs. Sangha chuckled, pleased that she had such a predictable effect on him. He pressed his face in her shoulder. Dolly glared at Mrs. Sangha. Mrs. Sangha patted and rubbed his back, rocked her body side to side. Dolly reached for him, but Mrs. Sangha pivoted swiftly on both feet, turned her back to Dolly, and wrapped her arms around the boy tightly. She laughed at Dolly and said, “But like you don’t have enough clothes to wash or what? Why you running up here every few minutes so? Leave the children alone. They doing nothing wrong. They break anything? I have one eye on them. If they was doing wrong, I would have stopped them long ago. What? You think I can’t mind child?”
Dolly felt her cheeks redden and her lips thicken with rage she could not, in her position as servant, express. She wanted to grab her child out of her employer’s arms, to scream “Put down mih child,” but she needed this job.
Mrs. Sangha kept her back rigidly turned to Dolly. She did not want to see Dolly’s face set up. She rocked the boy, still rubbing his back. Then she set him down, took his hand and her daughter’s, and led them out of the room. Dolly, near tears of fury but determined not to let them fall, watched the three of them. Her son didn’t even turn back to look at her. He went so easily with Mrs. Sangha. Dolly shook her head as if trying to dislodge a strange confusion there: anger as tight as a fist for her employer, and for both Mrs. Sangha and her son, simultaneous compassion. Mrs. Sangha sent her home with so much she herself could not afford to provide him with. Like the clothes he wore even now. She treated Dolly and the boy like relations, poor ones perhaps, but nevertheless like family rather than servants. And no matter how good Tante Eugenie and Uncle Mako were to Dolly and her son, they were different. Regardless of the mind those two old people paid them, the fact that they were of African descent loomed large in Dolly’s mind. They looked different, they had different ways, different values. Dolly didn’t want her child to grow up boldface, boldface, like Uncle Mako and the other black-skinned men in the village. Or growing up to be a fisherman; when they were not catching fish, they were standing up on the beach idle so, listening for drums and voices calling them from across the sea. They gathered on the beach as if they were a council with authority, pointing up the horizon and down the horizon, arguing with one another. One saying, “It over there,” the other saying, “No, no. Is over there. You don’t see how the coconut does come in a stream traveling from that direction, man? You have to follow that stream if you want to go home.” When all she ever heard was pounding waves and thunder, they mouthed nonsense all day long about how one of these good days they would follow sounds beckoning them, all the way back to their homeland. She saw how the boy, when he was with Uncle Mako, watched wide-eyed when they jumped up and danced on the beach, shouting that the day, praise the Lord! would certainly come when they would see land in the distance, and that land would either be heaven or the home from which their ancestors had been taken, and to which they themselves would, praise the Lord, return. Even her Indian used to talk so, and she never understood what he meant. He had become so much like them that he had forgotten his own history. She didn’t want her child dreaming of places that didn’t exist. If she’d had her way, they would have left that place in two twos. But to go where? Not across any sea, but to the town, to Marion, right here, and she would live in and work for Mrs. Sangha as she saved her money to send her son to a town school. She and Mrs. Sangha were Indians and Indians alike. Their circumstances were different, it was true, but their ancestors had all landed up in Guanagaspar the same way, by boat from India and as indentured servants. Mrs. Sangha’s family came as indentured servants, and it was only chance that had led them down different paths. Mrs. Sangha was a madam and Dolly was a servant, and the boy would have to learn that difference, too.
Dolly knew also that the same child who would not now come to her would expect her to go outside with him in the coming night to look up at the black sky and tell him, as she had done from the time he was born, which constellation was which, and which star which. Can Mrs. Sangha do that? she mockingly thought. He would, on the coconut-fiber mattress behind the sugar-sack curtain dividing the house into two rooms, lie close against her. He would fall asleep, as usual, as she rubbed his back and mumbled songs to him, songs she barely remembered from her mother—whom she hardly thought of anymore, having not seen her since she and her son had banished Dolly. She knew, come tomorrow, weather permitting, the child would sit on her lap on a fallen coconut tree on the beach and ask her to tell him over and over the same stories, stories about his father, stories Mrs. Sangha could not have known.
Dolly retreated downstairs. There, she let herself go, and tears came steadily, like rainy-season rain. Tante Eugenie had asked her countless times to let her keep the child on Saturdays. But Tante Eugenie and Uncle Mako were old now. Minding a child was full-time work. What if they turned their backs on him and next thing you knew he was out on the beach, or worse, running into the sea? Uncle Mako had his eyes on that horizon half the day, mumbling his nonsense about how he was sure he had family over there, how he was neglecting his great-grandparents across the water—an old man like that expecting to have grandparents—how they must be wondering about him, and how he would surely meet them one day soon. What if he decided to take the boy with him? All the foolishness he did, showing the child things to frighten him. Like the magic he did with his finger, making the forefinger disappear and telling the child it got cut off. Besides, if Uncle Mako was not frightening or filling the boy’s head with ideas about seeing what lay out there on the other side of the water, the other fishermen were always collecting in his yard, drinking, cussing, talking all kinds of adult business without care for which child might have been listening.
There was nobody else to leave him with. Besides, if indeed there had been somebody, she wondered if she could, in all honesty, let him out of her sight for a whole day. Tears ran down her cheeks, searched out the corners of her mouth. She opened her mouth and licked in the comforting saltiness. She scrubbed clothing so forcefully, so fitfully, against the concrete that her fingers and knuckles reddened and bruised.